PV Taiwan 2016, held during Oct. 12 ~ 14 in Taiwan, was the first large PV tradeshow in Asia-pacific region since China's National Holidays. This tradeshow has generated a lot of interests and lively discussions, and was an indicator to future price trend across the PV value chain. According to data collected in the tradeshow, prices for min-stream products have obviously taken off due to short-term imbalanced supply-and-demand. Manufacturers' expectation to price uptrend in October is optimistic.
The market has become busy. Recently, entire supply chain has gradually escalated its utilization rates. PV cell manufacturers’ utilization rates even swelled more rapidly. The strong demand toward high conversion efficiency products has led to urgent price hikes for ultra-high-efficiency multi-si wafers. During this week, price for multi-si wafers in China has surpassed RMB 4.4 / pc, and in Taiwan has come above US $0.56 / pc, representing a three percent price increase scale showed up in simply one week. The highs of spot price even exceeded US $0.6 / pc. As of now, ultra-high-efficiency wafers are still highly in demand. The price is estimated to keep on growing in the coming two weeks as a result.
Mono-si wafers experienced a demand recovery as well, while most of the supply has come from tier-one suppliers. Price raise in multi-si wafers drove fast bouncing upwards significantly, and spot price has regained ground at a firm US $0.7 / pc and would steadily move up.
As mono- and multi-si wafer prices have quickly up-swung, PV cells quotes will also reflect their rising material costs. After China's National Holiday, mono-si PERC cells’ price began to pull up first due to their supply shortage. For PV cells with standard conversion efficiencies, the spot prices were generally raised to around US $0.29 / W. Regarding to mono-si PERC cells with higher efficiency above 21%, the prices became much greater than prior price US $0.3 / W. Spot price for multi-si PV cells with efficiency above 18.4% will see a comparable trend by reaching US $0.21 / W very soon, and will open up a bigger lead from standard PV cells.
Following China’s holidays, downstream side has not seen huge installation demand. Although mid-stream of supply chain product price started to grow, the industry has concerned that price hike was only tentative. EnergyTrend predicts that the demand side will experience a new installation mania from November 2016 to Lunar New Year of 2017, because China would slash subsidies by July 1st 2017.
Although prices for wafers and cells both significantly raised after China’s National Holiday, the PV industry eventually must return to its fundamental supply-and-demand. Overly glutting caused module price to continuously fall. Even though cell and wafer makers have seized the moment to raise their prices, they may soon encounter the pressure of price cut again. Their next opportunities will be at the end of year 2016, when the market will start to swiftly procure in a huge quantity. That will be the time to break through price ceiling and to surface another wave of price increase.
(Analysis provided by Corrine Lin, analyst at EnergyTrend. Translated by Janet Chen, a translator of TrendForce Corp.)